


Coda

by RennIreigh



Series: Patchouli [11]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25784704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RennIreigh/pseuds/RennIreigh
Summary: In which a knock at Sabrina's door recalls the sight of old footprints in the dust.
Series: Patchouli [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/22751
Kudos: 3





	Coda

Sabrina is a Gym Leader now. She hasn’t heard from him in years- the last she saw of him was his back, and the footprints in the dust. The Team absorbed into the gym staff or dispersed; the Elites to battling for badges or to their research or their leisure. Koga finally stepped down when the ache set into his joints, retiring to Erika's greenhouse to breed Bellsprout and ornamental roses, and left his gym to his daughter, whose name Sabrina can never recall; they seem to only meet for tea at the changing of the seasons. She seems to spend half her time in Indigo now, meeting Will to train or Karin for lunch; she and Morty trade visits, walks in Ecruteak's or Saffron's woods and the most bemusing discussions of history and mythology. Her black sweater, her scarlet letter, lie folded in her bottom drawer. She hasn't opened it for a long time.

She is challenged often and sometimes she loses, but she has never liked to lose, and even in her newly constant state of dispassion she cannot bring herself to become complacent. She’s laid new teleportation pads in her gym, instead. Some challengers leave before they even reach her, and she hears them outside, swearing in the corridor.

Today she is walking to the Gym to unlock it and begin the day when she sees the red-headed boy sitting on the step. “You are early,” she tells him, grocery bag floating behind her. “I do not accept challenges for another hour.”

“I’m not here to fight you,” he says.

“I do not take students.”

“I’m here from Giovanni,” he says, and she freezes, snaps- “Where is he?”

But he hesitates, and she understands.

Her mind unlocks the door by rote, but she turns the knob for once to give her trembling hands something to do. “Come inside.”

The years fall on back on her as she leads him to the chamber she refers to as her office, although it is nothing like the sumptuous room that Giovanni had in Celadon’s base. She pours that shaking feeling inside of her into the water in the teapot, setting it to boil. 

“How did he die?” she asks once they’ve sat, the first words she’s spoken since they entered the Gym.

“Protecting me,” the boy says, and Sabrina remembers the picture she had seen on the shelf in his library.

“You are his son,” she says.

“I am.”

“He found you, then,” she says, more to herself than him.

The boy shrugs.

“He had been looking for a long time.” It is not like her to be so imprecise, but seeing him brings that time crashing back to her.

“He said that.”

Sabrina does not know what to say.

“I tried to heal him,” the boy says suddenly, his words coming in a rush. “I took him to a place where he could recover. He didn’t want-- He said he was going to die.”

She remembers his pallor, the dullness of his eyes waking up in that little apartment bed. “He was a sick man.”

“He said he wanted you.”

She looks up from her tea, startled.

“He said he wanted to see you, and I said I would get you, and then he said no, he didn’t want you to see him like that. I told him I didn’t know who you were but you’d probably want to see him anyway, to say goodbye, and he told me to tell you that he did not want to say goodbye to you.” The boy hesitates. “I don’t think he meant it the way it came out.”

“He didn’t,” she says absently. So he had thought of her, at the end. But he had his pride. And he hated finality.

“He wanted to see you, but he didn’t want you to see him. But he wasn’t strong enough to leave.”

“When did he die?”

“Three hours ago. He told me that when he died I was to come find you.”

“Where is he?”

“A base of mine. Not far from here.”

“I would like to see him.”

“He said he wanted that.” The boy looks at her evenly and she realizes that he is not so young as she had thought. “Why he wouldn’t want you to see him when he was alive is beyond me, but I don’t know you.”

There is nothing to say to that.

“Anyway, he said that you would know what he would want done.” The boy hesitates. “Look, I apologize. I didn’t know him that long, and like I said, I don’t know you. Are you family?”

Sabrina considers. “No,” she says. “Your father and I were… friends.” Saying “Your father and I” makes her realize that she is old enough to be this boy’s mother, and though there is no gray in her hair, she feels all of her years.

She realizes that the boy is waiting for more of an explanation—an explanation she cannot and will not give. “I do not know your mother,” she says. “Giovanni never spoke of her.” She will not call her own attention to her age again. “His family is all deceased. If you were expecting a funeral…”

“I don’t know what to expect,” he says flatly. “He and I met again less than a week ago. I barely knew him.”

“But you knew him well enough to stay with him when he was dying,” she points out.

The boy shrugs awkwardly. “He was dying.”

“Thank you,” she says, and it surprises both of them. “You meant a lot to him.”

He looks like he is about to say something but changes his mind. “Were you one of the Rockets?”

She looks at him levelly. “Does it make a difference?”

He shrugs, looks away. “I guess not.” She has given him his answer, and he knows it, so his next words come out halting. “Did he… I mean, do you know what I…”

Visions flash in front of her eyes of the Silph building, and stone falling, and children running away. “You may rest assured,” she says softly, “that if you did not want to take up your father’s mantle he would not have forced you.”

“Thank you,” he says with obvious relief.

She sees another vision, of this boy in a Rocket uniform and cloak too big for him, and she knows he has already been forced. “Whatever schemes already affected you were not his.”

“How do you know?” His voice is suddenly full of suspicion.

She twitches a lip despite herself, gesturing toward the teacup she's left floating in the air, the teleporter pads. He smiles a little.

“You knew him so much better than I ever did,” he says wistfully, “and I’m his son.”

She _almost_ says, “We were friends,” but she realizes that he is looking for a different answer. “We had more time to know each other.”

“I was kidnapped from him,” he says flatly, and she almost agrees until she sees it differently.

“You were kidnapped from your mother,” she tells him, and he startles. “You were visiting her for a weekend. She took you… shopping,” she says, watching the vision play in front of her eyes like a movie screen colored by emotion. “You stopped to look at a toy. A stuffed Teddiursa. You had lagged behind all day. She didn’t notice you weren’t behind her until she had gone from your sight. When she returned you weren’t there.”

“How do you _know_ all this?” he demands.

“I am Psychic,” she reminds him. “I see things that others cannot. Giovanni was frantic. Your mother was too, but he more so. None of his contacts could find you. They couldn't find _her-_ he'd thought she'd run off with you, that you were together, but she died young." _As young as he,_ the thought slipped out, she spoke again to bite it off. "He never stopped looking. When he… got sick, he left to look with his eyes, not with his intelligence. He wanted to see you grown up before he died.”

The boy digests all this in silence. Sabrina realizes she likes him. “Thank you,” he says finally. “I never knew him,” he repeats, and she realizes that it is troubling him.

“He barely knew you, and he hated that.”

“Did he… talk about me much?”

“Almost never,” she answers, and realizes that that is the wrong way of saying it. “It hurt him too much to talk about you. It reminded him.”

“I know,” he says, and she realizes he is speaking from his own experience.

“He never said your name. He always called you ‘my son.’ He never forgot that you were his son and he never forgot to look for you.” She sees the boy is about to cry and she lays a hand on his. “You were loved,” she says quietly, and although the word “love” had never been in Giovanni’s vocabulary- nor hers for that matter- she knows that it is true.

He presses his lips together and halts the tears before they start. She notices and approves of his discipline. “You knew him well,” he says finally.

“I did.”

“Can you tell me about him?”

Sabrina hesitates. But Giovanni is dead. He is not waiting for her, stretched out somewhere in a base south of Saffron. And this boy is his son, who barely knew him. “He was a proud man,” she says. “He valued accomplishing, not just _doing_. He approved of success. At the same time he did not treat failure as a miserable occurrence but as the result of actions. He always learned from a failure. He would have considered it foolish not to retrospect on it.” She omits that he had never said that in as many words to the Elites. He had never said that to her, either, not that directly, but she remembers his voice saying _We were lucky._

“Strategic,” the boy notes, and she nods.

“Very. He took delight in strategy. He studied the works of writers who discussed battle tactics. He was a voracious reader. He loved poetry,” she remembers. “We all thought he was up to important business in his library office but usually he was just reading. If he was up to his elbows in paperwork he would answer a knock on the door. If he was reading he wouldn’t. He said paperwork happens all the time, but there is never _this moment_ for words. He always read books in one sitting. He would never space them out. He said if he was interrupted at his reading he would not be in the same place to begin to read again.” She had not understood what he meant until now, she realizes. “He was respected as a Gym Leader even by those who knew he was also the Commander Rocket. He battled fairly and was proud to award a badge to a challenger who had given him a good fight. Indigo Plateau did not like him, but they respected him.”

“Why didn’t they like him?”

“He could be off-putting,” she says, and that is an understatement. “Abrupt. Sharp. Never rude, though. He was not sociable because he preferred to associate with people whose intellect could compete with his own, and his was formidable. So he had a penchant for not showing up at parties. Or rather, he showed up late and spent the evening sitting in a corner, watching everyone.”

“He said something like that,” the boy says suddenly. “He was a little delirious at the end and I think he was seeing things that weren’t there. He said he had come late but a woman had seen him. He asked me if I wanted wine.”

Sabrina doesn’t smile, not exactly. “I remember.”

“So it was real?”

She nods. “Some years ago now, but real.”

“I didn’t know.”

She can’t think of what to say to that.

“If he wasn’t sociable,” the boy asks, and his voice is tentative. “How did you become such great friends?”

Sabrina starts to say “Because I am not sociable either” but this question is not really about her. “We had a great deal in common,” she says instead. “And in the context of our work we saw each other often. We spoke often. We lent each other books and discussed them.”

“That’s how he mentioned you at first,” the boy says. “He was delirious, like I said, and he said, ‘Sabrina, I’ve come to give back your book.’”

“He was a good bookkeeper,” she says. “Keeping paperwork orderly annoyed him. Keeping his library pristine was important. He spent more time in there than in his own quarters, I think. If something went wrong in the night and he had to be alerted, that was where I always found him.”

She envisions him sitting at his desk with a book, the lamp casting shadows across his face, looking up with surprise when she knocked diffidently and entered. She sees his irritation as he realizes that his reading has been irreversibly interrupted, and she sees it vanish as his duty calls him. He loved Team Rocket, if not the paperwork, and the Team would take precedence always over almost anything else.

She realizes she is about to get emotional and takes a deep breath. “I would like to see him,” she says to the boy, and she is proud that her voice does not shake because she is shaking inside.

The boy nods. “He told me to bring you to him when he died and that you would know what to do,” he repeats. “My Murkrow is rested now.”

She shakes her head. “We will teleport,” she says. “It is faster. Picture where you want us to go, and hold tight to my hand.”

He looks like he is about to argue, but subsides. “All right,” he says, and takes her hand with his eyes squeezed shut. She sees a grove of trees whose shadows nearly conceal the rock, which itself nearly obscures the entrance to the cavern, but in truth she doesn’t need the visual. She focuses her mind on Giovanni, as clear a marker to her as home, and teleports to him.

  
  


He is buried in a quiet area outside Viridian City. He had not expressed any wish for that spot, but the earth welcomes him here.

She places a small pyramid of stones at his head until his granite marker arrives. She could have telekinetically assembled it herself and placed it here but she feels he would appreciate the tradition of the one-month wait before marking the grave.

When the headstone arrives it simply reads his name, _Giovanni Matricciani_ , and only someone who knows what they are looking for will find the letter R in the scrollwork. She places the stone above his head and sits there with him, under the shade of an oak tree. She'll tell Koga about it later; they will never visit it together. She will never visit it again.

_I miss you_ , she thinks, and because she isn’t speaking aloud and because no one can hear her or read her face like he could, she keeps thinking to him. _I wish you had said goodbye. I wish you had let me heal you- I wish you had let me try. Your_ pride! She is shaking.

_I am not angry at you,_ she lies to the ghost he doesn’t have.

_I miss you,_ she repeats, and she feels the tears rise up but this time she does not fight them. In Viridian without him, Sabrina cries.

  
  



End file.
